Yahoo Explores Genome; Demand Curves And Display

Goodbye Interclick, hello Genome. Yahoo has gone live with its integrated audience buying offering spawned from the purchase of Interclick late last year. The audience marketplace will bring to bear a range of first and third party data including Yahoo search and user data. As for inventory, that comes from Yahoo, the AOL/Microsoft deal, and Interclick's one thousand publisher sites. Peter Foster, Yahoo's GM of audience/performance advertising, calls Genome "a holistic combination of data inputs, premium supply and actionable analytics that can help marketers achieve their objectives from the top to the bottom of the funnel." Read the blog post.

History Channel Demand Curve?

In the not-too-distant future, everything subscribable from newspapers to magazines and cable will be available in a neat package for consumers. As anyone who's been watching magazine publishers grumble about acquiescing to Apple's "newsstand" policies, or seeing the slow adoption of TV Everywhere for cable operators can attest, the big question is: will subscription-model media be able to generate sustainable revenue? Or will everything ultimately have to rely more heavily on an online ad model? Chris Dixon, angel investor and co-founder of eBay's Hunch, believes that "bundled pricing" can have benefits for buyers and sellers, particularly for popular cable TV channels. Read more.

Display Dangers

Don't most analysts project continued double-digit growth for display advertising? Much of that is going to Google and Facebook as they fight for display dominance. But surely there must be a lot to go around for the rest. Perhaps not, according to a Reuters report by Alistair Barr and Poornima Gupta, who look at the meaning of Microsoft's $6 billion writedown related to its purchase of digital ad shop aQuantive in 2007. "Ad industry executives say [Microsoft] might now join Yahoo in re-thinking its approach to Internet advertising, though there's no simple solution to the fundamental challenges they face," the Reuters duo writes. Read more.

Ad Tech Usability

In a world full of pretty apps, the ad tech arsenal has to embrace a design sensibility. Writing for Mediapost, Matt Stratz holds forth on how to "keep it simple," "understand color," and "add a showstopper," among other necessaries. "As consumer expectations for design migrate to business, it's more important than ever to build ad-tech systems that people actually want to use." Read the post.

Yield For Germany

Dirk Freytag has been hired by sell-side platform Rubicon Project to help with inventory efforts in Germany. A release states, "The former CEO of ADTECH and SVP at AOL (will be) working on a consultancy basis [to] increase the adoption and usage of the REVV real-time trading platform in Europe, manage the German operations and grow the local team." Read more.

European RTB Report

London-based trading desk Infectious Media has released its Spring 2012 report on the European real-time bidding (RTB) market. According to the Infectious data, "CPMs (cost-per-thousand) for advertising impressions in the UK are not the highest in Europe, with Italy and Germany now taking the lead. This shift has been led by relative price stability in the UK contrasting against rapid increases in Western European markets this quarter. These increases have also led to a strengthening of the East-West divide, clearly splitting the continent into two regions of relatively high and relatively low CPM. Scandinavia particularly saw CPM rise." Get the report (PDF). And, read the release. Infectious sees maturation in some countries when it comes to RTB, in others, high CPMs and presumably less exact pricing may indicate it's still early days.

New Website!

PubMatic has launched a new website which includes an eCPM ticker of display media by vertical which is presumably being sold through its sell-side platform. See it now!